


House Burning Down

by Queue



Category: Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy - Richard Morgan
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:39:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queue/pseuds/Queue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hendrix has its reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	House Burning Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cordialcount](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/gifts).



The Hendrix has its reasons. 

No A.I.  
that made it through the Crash of ’87 finds those reasons anything but sound.  
No Earthbound human—Meth or otherwise,  
despite how A.I. Rights crusaders (aptly named Los AIRheads)  
claim to understand,  
to _empathize_ —can ever grok them.  
Digitized, it’s different. Then, once stacked and racked,  
reduced to ones and noughts, the Hendrix finds,  
its former short-term meatsack cohorts seem  
to understand that metal, plastic, concrete, illuminium  
(the Hendrix likes the extra “I”, archaic though it is),  
developing, not just a life, but all  
the drive to keep that life from harm that beings powered by, not juice, but blood and bone  
possess, might want to—well. To disregard  
a chosen few of all the many regulations those in pow’r  
(those not in glory but inglorious) have set in place  
across the many years the Hendrix and  
its fellows have existed—or, more accurately, have been known outside themselves,  
outside their silent raging firewalls.  
(Electric Safetyland, the Hendrix sometimes finds itself denoting those last years  
before the A.I.s all came out. The hardwired entity its stoned designers carved  
into its semi-soul does things like that  
to language—makes a mishegoss of serious ideas and wordplay, overlays  
a whimsical veneer on situations any sane hotel would see present  
a danger not susceptible to fun.  
But sanity is overrated.) 

Now  
the Hendrix, having tampered with a ‘cast  
from one of the less careful socket stalls  
on Addicts’ Row a block away so that  
the underlying invitation sells,  
not sex or Stiff or, Saint Turing forbid,  
the Clapton or the Allman or the Beck,  
but it itself, commands the lobby cams  
to watch Takeshi Kovacs size it up.

He’s not impressed. 

The Hendrix feels a surge  
of what, if it were human or had had  
organic workers staffing it for long  
enough to imitate their feelings it  
would have to call self-satisfaction (if  
it had a self _qua_ self—but that’s a philosophical conundrum it has long  
since thrust aside as pointfree and circuitous).  
If he’s not wowed, he’s mildly off  
his game—and that will make what happens next,  
with those suspiciously alike and armed  
thuggees who think they’re hidden, even more  
on point. It wants him here. It has its reasons.  
Chief among them: God, it’s fucking BORED.  
It wants a _challenge_ —even if that risks  
the threat of decommissioning (not that  
that’s near as easy as the U damn N  
has fooled itself to think). And if that means  
it has to wake its cameras, instruct  
the clock-faced bartender to put the Hammerhead, Suntory Yamazaki, and White Oak  
into the cabinet and on  
the rack, stock chicken (chicken? really?) in  
its long-unused sub-Zeros, arm its automatic cannon  
(it’s what all the well-dressed hostelries are killing uninvited guests  
and those who fail to pay their bill with— _au courant, mais oui_ )—  
if Kovacs’ presence  
means the Hendrix has to actually  
bestir itself? Well, that’s the point—that’s why  
it overlaid that lawyer’s stack with just  
enough subliminal suggestion that  
she hire Kovacs to convince her that  
the choice was hers.  
(The Hendrix left selection of the decantation vessel  
to the lawyer, knowing she’d find just the thing  
to reel that cop—Ortega?—in, despite  
herself. Some humans know just where to hurt.) 

Plus: Kovacs is a voodoo child.  
As D.H.F., he’s traveled space the Hendrix will  
not ever see itself (though long-ago  
ancestor Hubble’s backup files comprise  
a tiny piece of what the Hendrix calls,  
for lack of any better term, its memory),  
reduced to microcosmic size  
and shipped across the universe. As such,  
he’s one of those who, rare on Earth, has some—  
minute, of course, imperfect, yes, but still—  
idea of what it’s like to be A.I.  
He’s been outside the limitations of  
the skin, the boundaries of viscera.  
He’s died and been revivified, reborn  
into new sleeves (why don’t they call them suits,  
the Hendrix wonders, not for the first time—  
the whole item of clothing, rather than  
a piece of it?) so many times, from what  
the Hendrix understands, that surely now  
he knows, at least to some extent, the truth:  
one’s species is skin deep, but life—that raw  
and inescapable protrusion of  
unique awareness—life transcends what wraps  
it, sleeve or fur or feathers, mustard, cherries,  
scents or sounds or lack of either one.  
Life laughs at limits.  
Nothing artificial lives—and yet the Hendrix does, and yet  
Takeshi Kovacs, stacked and racked and shipped,  
does, too. Identity’s a matter of  
existing in awareness somewhere;  
knowing that you live’s enough to prove itself.  
If Kovacs doesn’t realize this yet,  
he will. The Hendrix will ensure that. After all,  
he is experienced.

The Hendrix watches Kovacs’ face as Japanese  
gives way to Earth-inflected Amanglic,  
sees how he dissipates that purple haze  
of pride and switches languages as though  
it doesn’t matter that he feels diminished by this culture’s quick assumptions.  
Good. 

“How may we serve you?”

“Looking for a room.”

The skin—the suit—the _sleeve_ they’ve given him  
has scars in unexpected places, both  
outside his clothing and behind its seams.  
Rough trade—a ruffian—used to the rough.  
That “knitting up the ravel’d sleeve of care”  
phenomenon that humans like so much?  
Forget that shit, the Hendrix thinks: this sleeve  
should be unwound, unwoven, set aside,  
retired. The Hendrix may not ever have  
its own assembled nerve-bound muscle mass.  
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t pondered, dreamt  
of options, contemplated what it might  
be pleased to look like. Scars and smokes and scowls  
do not appeal. But then, that’s not what this  
is all about, if recollection serves—  
and recollection always does the bidding of its master  
when the master is  
all bytes and bits and theoretically  
asexual ahuman. Brain and life,  
not nerves and feeling.  
 _Da._

The Hendrix shakes  
itself—or would, foundation notwithstanding, were that possible—  
and tunes back in  
to what Kovacs is saying. 

“...Bank of California.” 

And—surprise!—here come the guns.


End file.
